What do I see in 2006?

My predictions for enterprise information management in 2006 center around:

1)      Search – everyone knows Google, Yahoo! and MSN (GYM as we affectionately call them) and as John Battelle says in his book The Search, GYM and others have transformed our culture.  But Search as we know it has its limits.  I see Search changing in three distinct ways:

a.       Visualization – fewer lists of headlines with links to articles or web pages and more meaningful "information" presented visually as Factiva is doing in its new release of Search 2.0

b.      More emphasis on “vertical search”

c.       More emphasis on “enterprise search”

2)      Collaboration Tools – this is linked to enterprise search; interest in collaboration tools will intensify as companies work to be FAST – respond quickly to market opportunities and threats – they must tap into all of their intellectual and information assets.  Driving this trend is the need for employees in enterprises around the world to FIND the information they need to do their jobs.  Today, most do not find what they need. (See McKinseyQuarterly study, Strategy in an era of global giants)

3)      Metadata - taxonomies & ontologies   - terms are becoming more common and broadly understood, thanks to del.icio.us and Flickr.  But as Forrester notes, it is early days.  I believe that a more strategic approach to metatagging is required for the enterprise. Folksonomies are good, but relying on business people to tag articles on their own is risky, they are simply too busy to take the extra minute required to tag. A more powerful means of managing information requires a strategic view of how the organization’s information must be categorized and tools to automate the application of the tags must be implemented to ensure universal and consistent application of tags.

Comments

[Napoleon Dynamite]

What value is search if it doesn't have the momentum of 8000+ source contracts with news sources? Most Internet users believe that all information is available on the web. Factiva's great value is in having access to more than just web sites, but is that going to last?

Let's not bank the money now. Those 8000+ contracts probably have an expiry date. And who'd be the content source to put the long-term value of their archive in a 3rd party when GYM makes it much easier to extract the value directly?

All the librarian-esque categorisation is only going to take you so far. The weight of the user expectation is that GYM will find the content (folksonomy, taxonomy, ontology) and there'll be a quick advertising break and then content consumption...

The idea of a subscription for a search feels all Web 0.0, whereas a content specific advertising promotion is the Web 2.0 world...

I'd suggest that Factiva make a break from Enterprise asap and head to the consumer hills. You have the relationships, just don't burn those bridges with a bunch of sales people - web services, lightweight contracts and a good dose of future thinking might take Factiva beyond the 1990s database world.

[Dave]

I think what Factiva are doing with Search 2.0 is great. It's what a lot of companies in the reputation management space have been doing for years, so welcome aboard. I do think, however, that GYM (Google, Microsoft and Yahoo) will offer comparable tools for free in the not-too-distant future.

[Clare Hart]

Thanks for your passionate statement about Factiva. It’s great when users like you take the time to offer feedback. I want to reassure you that we have no plans to replace the advanced searching capabilities of Factiva.com with Factiva Search 2.0. We know that research professionals require tools and functionality that pinpoint and filter information to exacting requirements. That’s been our area of focus and expertise since our inception in 2001. We will continue our focus in this area moving forward.

Factiva Search 2.0 is being developed to meet the needs of business professionals who are familiar and comfortable with general web search engines. With simplified yet powerful search functionality and visualized, filtered search results, we’re confident that we’re heading in the right direction with Search 2.0 for end users. As we are in beta with Search 2.0, we welcome all feedback.

[Factiva User]

I just tried Search 2.0 and frankly, is way inferior to the existing Factiva. I have been a heavy and long-time user of Factiva and can't believe that you have developed this product. You talk about eliminating information overload-well this product makes the information overload problem 10 times worse!

You think that you can use one standard format to make everyone happy in terms of what articles you want? Are you guys crazy? Give us the flexibility to decide what we want to search for--i.e. articles that mention a particular word three times and another once, plus ones with word count more than say 1,000, plus we can choose exactly what publications to choose from. Well, that is POWER! It is amazing! And now you want to take that all away and try to sort the results based on certain categories, assuming that will be what we want! Again, I am just astonished! You guys can't be serious!

I will seriously consider cancelling if you change to this new product and frankly, I would assume many others will as well. I will immediately look into other products like Lexis Nexis.

[Mercy]

You nailed it on the head about the metadata! My manager and I are emphasizing the need for a strategy for our metadata. Thanks for confirming that we are on the right track! What was the date of the Forrester publication?

[Leslie Norman]

I agree with your comments about metadata. Unfortunately, most organizations don't realize that librarians, and not IT people, are better equipped to create consistent standards that have actual meaning. (And I don't mean Dewey or LC classifications-- every librarians should know the shortcomings of those systems in the corporate world.)

Librarians and IT people need to work together to create the tools necessary to automate the process. But let librarians or those with such training create the standards with input from all areas of the company. The main lesson I learned from cataloguing class was that if users can't find information, then it doesn't exist--information is only useful when it can be found easily and used to create more knowledge.